Even the very best movies can mince with technological accuracy, especially if it is in the service of telling a great story. Whether making a spectacularly awful prediction of future tech or simply depicting existing apparatus in a thoroughly implausible way, these movies all distracted us with their downright absurd claims as to what computers, weapons, and general human advancement has been able to achieve. In a great film, it's something we simply shrug and accept (after writing an article whining about it, of course), but when a film sucks, this is only liable to make it worse (and going by our lead-in image, I think you probably know what the test case is going to be). Whether totally patronising or knowingly over-the-top, here are 10 horrendously inaccurate depictions of technology in movies...
10. Cryogenic Freezing - Vanilla Sky
We learn near the end of Cameron Crowe's ambitious if messy sci-fi Vanilla Sky that the protagonist, David (Tom Cruise), has been in a cryonic sleep for the last 150 years after he committed suicide by way of a drug overdose. His subsequent experiences are a lucid dream that's part of the contract he signed with the company, yet with his subconscious essentially "leaking" into this dream, things haven't gone as planned at all. While the dream shtick is all speculative sci-fi nonsense - and very entertaining nonsense mind - the film's engagement with cryogenic freezing proves a little thornier given that it is an actual, somewhat realistic process. We assume that David was frozen in 2001, but at that time - and in fact, still very much today - cryogenic freezing largely involves having your head severed from your body and frozen in liquid nitrogen, which ostensibly is not what happened to David. Sure, it's one of the easier ones to get away with because the tech isn't widely accessible, but it's inaccurate nevertheless.